Pinocchio (2022) - Movie Review

While Snow White And The Seven Dwarves may have been where Disney’s animated film history started, along with their canon of Disney Princesses, their 1940 film version of Pinocchio is arguably where Disney as an artistic aesthetic began. The iconic soundtrack, to the point where When You Wish Upon A Star has essentially become the official anthem for Disney, the elegant use of metaphor in its depiction of a child self-actualising, the timeless animation, that horrifying donkey transformation scene (which likely gave birth to an entire generation of Cronenberg fans); it’s a well-deserved classic.

And it is also the latest film to get pulped and sifted in the modern Disney remake machine, and between the icy reception it’s garnered already and me losing all hope in these things being good anymore after Aladdin and The Lion King, I was fully expecting to hate this. Guess I’ve found my big dissenting opinion for the year, because I actually quite liked this.

Harriet (2020) - Movie Review

Religion is a neutral ideal. Over the lifetime of this blog, I have been finding myself leaning further and further away from the staunchly atheist views I held as a teenager; hell, for all intents and purpose, film is my religion, and my position as an ordained Dudeist, for me at least, is an extension of that mindset. Not that I’ve just stopped noticing religion wielded as a cudgel to serve its own ends; I’ve reviewed quite a few examples of that in action, and I wasn’t up for that shit then or now. What I mean with that first sentence is that I don’t inherently see people with religious ideals as a bad thing; it all comes down to the results aimed for and gained through those ideals, same as any other. And honestly, it’s through that lens that this film in particular interests me.

Bad Times At The El Royale (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: A priest (Jeff Bridges), a singer (Cynthia Erivo), a salesman (Jon Hamm) and a hippie (Dakota Johnson) all show up at the El Royale, a hotel that rests on the middle of the state border between California and Nevada. As they make themselves at home, under the attentive eye of concierge Miles (Lewis Pullman), the secrets and lies that brought them to this establishment begin to surface, and despite outward appearances, it seems like no one's hands are clean.